Pops and Diz

by Kirk Woodward

[As ROTters will know, my friend Kirk Woodward is a long-time jazz enthusiast.  (See “Some Of That Jazz,” posted on 7 June 2015.)  Kirk’s not only a fan, but as a musician and composer himself, has the musical knowledge to know what the instrumentalists are doing and analyze his own responses.  That makes his discussion below of the contrasts and similarities between two jazz greats, Louis Armstrong (“Pops”) and Dizzie Gillespie (“Diz”), whose styles varied but who played together occasionally and respected each other’s art, all that more revealing.  I don’t have the background to write cogently about music (among other topics),so I’m always on the look-out for contributors who can cover what I can’t.  Kirk, in addition to being my friend for more than 50 years, has been my go-to guy on music, not limited to jazz, since I launched Rick On Theater over eight years ago (at his suggestion, as it happens).  In “Pops and Diz,” I think you’ll see why.  Even if you’re not a jazz fan, I’m sure you’ll find his descriptions of the playing of Armstrong and Gillespie, two of America’s greatest musical artists, enlightening.  (Pay particular attention to his analysis of the two musicians playing together on “The Umbrella Man”:  you can almost hear them riffing!)]

In a sense a work of art is a capsulated form of the time in which it was created – but the “capsule” often omits important information, such as the author’s intentions in the piece, the circumstances in which it was created, the events that motivated the piece, and so on. For example, we have Shakespeare’s plays but essentially no information about his writing process except what little we can deduce from the plays.

In our electronic age, such artifacts don’t have to be literary – they can also be visual and auditory. One example is a scratchy kinetoscope of a duet, on a TV jazz special called the Timex All-Star Show broadcast 7 January 1959, between the jazz trumpeters Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) and Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993). The video can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqkoKIEESBs.

Louis, often nicknamed Pops,  and Dizzy or Diz, whose real name was John Birks Gillespie, represent two eras in jazz, and actually there is a third era between them – all in a space of about thirty or forty years, which demonstrates how quickly changes can take place in music.

Armstrong played magnificently melodic improvised music, and brought out the role of the soloist in jazz – ironically, considering that much of Dixieland is ensemble jazz. Armstrong influenced the great trumpeter Roy Eldridge (1911-1989), who in turn was Dizzy Gillespie’s primary early stylistic influence. In his autobiography, To Be, or not . . . To Bop (1979, Doubleday Books), Gillespie confirms this:

 . . . at one time, every trumpet player in the world, everybody who wasn’t in a classical band, had to be influenced by Louis Armstrong. Louis not only influenced trumpet players, he changed the modus operandi of music by inventing the solo. He came from King Oliver, and then he went out, and Roy Eldridge came from Louis Armstrong. I came from Roy Eldridge.

Armstrong’s musical approach is often called “Dixieland” and Gillespie’s, “bebop,” with “swing” coming between the two styles.  The terms, of course, can’t help being somewhat reductive; both men were greater than their styles.

I never heard Louis Armstrong in person; many of his performances can be seen on YouTube. I saw Roy Eldridge once at a jazz festival, and once at the old Jimmy Ryan’s jazz bar in midtown on Manhattan’s west side (now closed), where I asked him to play his famous specialty song “I Can’t Get Started,” and he did.

As for the jazz style known as bebop, Wikipedia says:

Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early to mid-1940s in the United States, which features songs characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisations based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody.

Bebop, pioneered by musicians including Gillespie on trumpet, the brilliant Charlie Parker (1920-1955) on alto saxophone, and the highly individualistic Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) on piano, had a rough time gaining popular acceptance, and Gillespie’s outgoing, boisterous personality helped the music overcome resistance – for example, Armstrong’s, as we shall see – and enter into and influence the mainstream of American music.

I was fortunate to see Dizzy Gillespie in person three times. I saw him at an outdoor concert in 1969, on the bill with another great trumpet player of the next generation of jazz, Miles Davis (1926-1991), although they didn’t play together that night. I also saw him, along with Thelonious Monk, at one of the Giants of Jazz concerts in Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, and at an evening of Latin-influenced jazz, one of Gillespie’s specialties.

Armstrong and Gillespie had much in common. They were both African American, both born in conditions of poverty; both had flamboyant personalities, both found the trumpet a perfect instrument of expression, both mastered their crafts to an extent previously unknown, both influenced untold numbers of musicians, both became enormous popular favorites.

But Armstrong could not reconcile himself to the complex bebop style of jazz, and said so, including in his act for a while a song that made fun of bebop musicians as “poor little lambs who have lost their way” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWjBZ8ZmI4s). Gillespie and others fired back, not just on musical elements but on Armstrong’s performing style. (More on that below.)

So when I found the “Umbrella Man” duet between Armstrong and Gillespie, I wondered what kind of personal relationship it represented. Had they met before? Were rehearsals tense? Was it actually evidence of a battle?

The song “The Umbrella Man” was originally a mawkish English ballad written by James Cavanaugh, Larry Stock, and Vincent Rose in 1924. The 1959 broadcast version is anything but mawkish.  The band, with Gillespie on trumpet, is also made up of: Les Spann (1932-1989), guitar; Sam Jones (1924-1981), bass; Lex Humphries (1936-1994), drums; and Junior Mance (b. 1928, and still with us, although he has now retired), piano. The three minute number goes like this:

(First chorus) Gillespie kicks off a fast waltz tempo with three quick stomps of his heel, and plays a fluid, straightforward introduction. He sings the song in a relaxed, offhand style, interrupted four times by Junior Mance screeching the umbrella man’s cry. Each time Dizzy looks askance. A transition to 4/4 time leads to:

(Second chorus) Gillespie begins a sprightly improvisation on the melody, looking over briefly to see if Armstrong has entered, which he does, playing fluid fills in response to Gillespie’s first two phrases. Armstrong plays four measures in his classic style, and Gillespie four in his, using at least twice as many notes as Armstrong. They finish the chorus with Armstrong playing second trumpet to Gillespie’s lead, Gillespie playing in a light-hearted Dixieland style, and Armstrong accompanying him flawlessly.

(Third chorus) Gillespie and Armstrong “trade eights,” alternating eight measures each. Armstrong gives Gillespie a long “Yeah – h – h – h – h!” during Gillespie’s first solo. Each plays in his own characteristic style, Gillespie dazzling, Armstrong majestic.

(Fourth chorus) Gillespie sings the song and Armstrong scats responses to each line, practically bouncing with pleasure. Gillespie inadvertently spits slightly on Armstrong at the line “He’ll fix your parasol” and Armstrong responds, “Your parasol is juicy, boy!” turns and wipes his face, scats again, and says, “Oh, turn that way.” Gillespie wipes his mouth just before he sings “It looks like rain” – “Yeah, man!” Armstrong says. 

They continue the song-and-scat through the rest of the chorus. (The “Swiss Kriss!” Armstrong includes in his scat is the name of his favorite laxative!)  Armstrong demonstrates again in this piece, as he so often did, that his scat singing is as memorable an aspect of jazz as his trumpet playing. At the end of the number Gillespie returns to the trumpet while Armstrong continues to scat. Jackie Gleason (1916-1987), the host of the TV special and a jazz fan and occasional orchestra leader as well as a comedian and actor, looms in the background as Gillespie and Armstrong slap palms.

This video artifact is a joyous celebration, a remarkable achievement, and a sure cure for a gloomy mood. So what was in fact the relationship between the two men? The answer, it appears, is that they knew each other well and were friendly. In fact, Gillespie’s autobiography includes a lovely photograph of Armstrong, Gillespie, Bobby Hackett (1915-1976), and Jimmy McPartland (1907-1991), the latter two also outstanding horn players, together at a party at Gillespie’s house.

Gillespie, a serious student of music, was always respectful of musicians from other “schools.” In his autobiography he maintains:

when [Armstrong] started talking about bebop, “Aww, that’s slop! No melody.” Louis Armstrong couldn’t hear what we were doing. Pops wasn’t schooled enough musically to hear the changes and harmonies we played.  Pops’ beauty as a melodic player and a “blower” caused all of us to play the way we did, especially trumpet players, but his age wasn’t equipped to go as far, musically, as we did. Chronologically, I knew that Louis Armstrong was our progenitor as King Oliver and Buddy Bolden had been his progenitors. I knew how their styles developed and had been knowing it all the time; so Louis’ statements about bebop didn’t bother me. I knew that I came through Roy Eldridge, a follower of Louis Armstrong. I wouldn’t say anything. I wouldn’t make any statement about the older guys’ playing because I respected them too much.

And Gillespie prided himself that

Louis Armstrong criticized us but not me personally, not for paying the trumpet, never. He always said bad things about the guys who copied me, but I never read where he said that I wasn’t a good trumpet player, that I couldn’t play my instrument.

However, Gillespie did criticize Armstrong’s performance style, as did others who thought Armstrong was “playing up” in a humiliating way to white audiences. Gillespie writes that

I criticized Louis for other things, such as his “plantation image.” We didn’t appreciate that about Louis Armstrong, and if anybody asked me about a certain public image of him, handkerchief over his head, grinning in the face of white racism, I never hesitated to say I didn’t like it. I didn’t want the white man to expect me to allow the same things Louis Armstrong did.

But Gillespie acknowledged that in some ways he did the same sort of thing:

Hell, I had my own way of “Tomming.” Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of Tomming, of accommodating itself to a basically unjust situation.

And he ultimately came to a different understanding of Armstrong’s behavior:

Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops’ grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile. Coming from a younger generation, I misjudged him.

This understanding made it possible for Gillespie to admire Armstrong’s great talent despite the differences in period styles:

Nowadays in jazz we know more about chords, progressions – and we try to work out different rhythms and things that they didn’t think about when Louis Armstrong blew. In his day all he did was play strictly from the soul, just strictly from his heart he just played. He didn’t think about no chords – he didn’t know nothing about no chords. Now, what we in the younger generation take from Louis Armstrong . . . is the soul.

So the two men’s TV appearance was in a sense a logical event:

Pops and I played together publicly for the first time on January 7, 1959 on the Timex All-Star Jazz Show, televised on CBS. Pops’ acceptance of this engagement sort of showed he accepted the olive branch we “boppers” had held out, and it showed he recognized that there didn’t have to be any competition between Dixieland and modern jazz.  But to let it be known that neither of us had given up his own brand of jazz, Pops and I played “The Umbrella Man” and battled it out, “Dixieland” versus “modern.” It was much more fun arguing with music than with words.

Gillespie says their appearance was “the first time” they played together publicly. I haven’t found references to other times. However, Gillespie writes that he and Armstrong intended to record an album together – Gillespie hoped there would be more than one, actually – but that the manager they shared at the time, Joe Glazer (1896-1969), refused to let it happen.

That would have been an album to cherish. Another event one wishes had been recorded was an evening in New York in which Armstrong became sick and was unable to finish a night club appearance. Gillespie wrapped up his own gig, went to the other club, and played Armstrong’s set in Armstrong’s style. What an event that would have been to see and hear.

In any case, we fortunately have the grainy kinescope of “The Umbrella Man” to thrill us over and over with a moment when two musical giants came together, with deep affection for their craft and for each other, and created a few moments of great art and even greater joy.

Some Of That Jazz

by Kirk Woodward

[Once again Kirk Woodward, my friend and a frequent contributor to ROT, comes back to the blog with a new piece of writing.  Returning to one of his strongest interests, music, Kirk here writes about jazz, a form of music in which he first became interested as a young teen.  This time, rather than discuss the form—probably a nearly impossible task for jazz anyway—Kirk’s reminiscing about some of the greats of the form he heard play before they passed from the scene.  This piece is a personal journey, but one on which it’s worth tagging along.  ~Rick]

A friend remarked once that conversations about jazz tend to consist of one person saying a name of a jazz musician, and a second person saying “Wow! Yeah! Great!” There’s some truth in that. Since I was fortunate to be able to see a number of the great figures from the first, or at least the second, generation of jazz giants – nearly all gone now – I’d like to pass on some of what I remember of them, but I’m not sure my descriptions will amount to much more than “Wow!”

I heard there was something called “jazz” in 1963, before I actually heard the music, and I felt I had some sort of responsibility to find out what it was like. Not knowing exactly in what direction to go, I bought a Ray Charles album, Yes Indeed (Atlantic Records, 1958), on June 14, 1963, when I was 15, played it continuously for weeks, and became a fan of Ray Charles forever. The liner notes mentioned some other names as well, like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, so I began to get some idea that jazz had a context.

This process was assisted, a bit later, by a collection of reviews, Such Sweet Thunder (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), by Whitney Balliett, then the jazz critic for The New Yorker. Through Balliett I came to learn about people like Earl Hines and Duke Ellington (see below) before I had heard them. This isn’t supposed to be possible, since music and the spoken word are so different, but Balliett was able to describe jazz in an intelligible way. You might not have been able to hear actual music from his descriptions, but you would not be surprised at how they played when you finally did.

RAY CHARLES (1930-2004)

My first jazz concert was, naturally enough, a Ray Charles concert – this must have been about 1964, at the Fairgrounds in Louisville, Kentucky. I don’t remember much except that I thought he was terrific. (See? “Wow!”) David “Fathead” Newman (1933-2009), whose character makes a vivid appearance in the movie Ray, was still in Charles’s band at that time, playing lead saxophone, and he played solos like the ones I’d memorized on Yes Indeed. I still think that Newman’s solo work with Charles is magnificent, and I was delighted when the two were reunited in 1977 on Saturday Night Live.

I saw Ray Charles many times after that, up to and including his last concert in New York City. Once during an intermission I talked to a trombonist in his band, Henry Coker (1919-79). I took up almost his whole break asking him questions, which didn’t delight him, and he wasn’t overwhelmed with the honor of playing for Ray either. He spent nearly all this time on the road away from his family, and he said Charles came to just the last few rehearsals before the band went on the road.

Almost every time I saw Charles, he provided some indelible moment. The very greatest was during a sensational concert at Wolf Trap near Washington, D.C., in perhaps 1970. The show had been delayed, and almost cancelled, by rain, which finally stopped – Charles said, “I’ve got connections.” Ray and the band had been in residence at Wolf Trap for nearly a week, and they were feeling at home. They played a long, improvised blues segment – filthy words and scratchy sounds; and the spoken climax on Ray’s song “Understanding” (“I’ll hit her upside the head with an axe – maybe she’ll understand that!” – different from the line on the record) hit such a peak that the audience literally screamed. “He’ll never be better than that,” my friend Steve Johnson said, and maybe Steve was right; but Ray was always remarkable.

Ray’s audience was so used to his routines that once at a sparsely attended (because poorly advertised) concert at Lincoln Center, when he finished “What’d I Say” no one applauded, because they knew, being hard core fans, that he’d be back for one more musical bit.

EARL HINES (1903-83)

My mother told me that Charles’s piano style reminded her of Earl Hines (she didn’t like Ray much otherwise; I argued for him and against Sinatra, a pointless argument if there ever was one), so I went to hear Hines at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., probably in 1968 or so. From the back of the room an old, chunky, bald man came in and walked on stage; there he is, old Earl, I thought. Then a tall young fellow with black hair strode to the piano and began to play. That was Hines, of course, the other man being Budd Johnson (1910-84), the saxophonist with whom Hines had recently reteamed. Hines would then have been about 66.

In a long couple of sets that night, I remember being especially dazzled by Hines’s multi-chorus tremolo in his famous song “Boogie Woogie on the St. Louis Blues,” which left the audience gasping (Hines had prodigious piano skills), and by Hines’s shouting, during a number written by a Russian jazz musician, “Play it to 1984!” which, as I recall, I was the only person to laugh at.

In the 1970s, in Manhattan, I was fortunate to be able to take my mother to hear Hines for the first time since she’d been a girl; we stood at the bar at Michael’s Pub while Hines played in the dining room. He walked by us later and we were able to mutter to him how much we admired him.

THELONIOUS MONK (1917-82)

I also saw Thelonious Monk at the Cellar Door in Washington. He didn’t dance during other musicians’ solos, as he was said to do (he can be seen doing it in films), but his extremely quirky sense of humor was in evidence. He opened with a discordant solo “Happy Birthday,” followed by “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .”) – both for reasons unexplained, since we didn’t know whose birthday it was, and it wasn’t Jesus’ – I mean, it wasn’t Christmas.

At the intermission at this show I talked with the drummer, an unhappy former vibraharp player who had been enlisted for this gig when Monk was short a drummer.  He pointed out that playing the vibes and drums were similar skills. Still, I persisted, it must be hard to play with Monk. He replied, bravely, I thought, “It’s the same four beats to the bar.” However, he didn’t seem happy. Someone told me that a few nights later, Monk abruptly announced to the audience, “Drum solo!” and walked off the stage, leaving the poor guy to fend for himself, figuring, I suppose, that he’d had enough preparation time.

My other memory of Monk at this appearance occurred after the band was packing up to leave. My friend and I were hanging around, and we saw an old, disheveled man, who at that time we might have called a bum, talking to Monk, and Monk staring at him with his baleful sheep’s eyes, giving him his complete attention. As we left, Monk waved the man to a chair and ordered him a drink and was still concentrating intently on the old fellow as we left, never saying a word as the man talked and talked.

Later at the Village Vanguard in Manhattan I saw Monk playing (with his son on drums) in two exuberant sets. In the second, some college kids near me sat in desperate frustration trying to figure out what Monk was playing, until one of them finally shouted, “Sweet Georgia Brown!” At this same show I walked past Monk as he came out of the men’s room and I was going in. He stared at me, balefully.

MJQ (1946-1974; 1981-1994)

Back again at the Cellar Door (or maybe the Byrd’s Nest – and could that be where I heard Hines?) –  it was a lovely room for jazz. The Modern Jazz Quartet (the MJQ)  was known for their creative but decorous jazz; I saw them one night when they swung so hard that the crowd started screaming and stomping.  The MJQ looked shocked, but couldn’t stop rockin’. I wish some people with ideas about how tame they were could have heard them that night.

COLEMAN HAWKINS (1904-69)

From Balliet’s book, and also from an unbelievable, mountainous blues solo on the album Jimmy Witherspoon at Monterey (Hi Fi Jazz, 1959), I came to admire the great tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and I heard him in person twice, once with Roy Eldridge (1911-89) at a jazz festival near Baltimore, in an afternoon session where he played a memorable “I Can’t Get Started,” and then in Louisville, Kentucky, six months before he died. I told my friend Bob Giammittorio that I felt I should see these people while they were still alive, and Bob drove down to Louisville from Virginia with me for the trip. The scene was a little jazz club down by the Ohio River that I think didn’t stay in business much longer.

Hawkins that night looked like an Old Testament prophet, with full beard and staring eyes. He had dropped his sax at the airport and damaged it, he said; he was obviously in failing health (and only a few months later drank himself to death), and he literally could hardly play during his first set, in addition to which he had a pickup band which somehow had never heard that he liked to play unaccompanied codas, so the leader, thinking he was smarter than this old geezer, kept cutting him off. In the second set, however, Hawkins recovered a little and played a “Yesterdays” that I treasure in memory.

Hawkins had a booming voice, a result of his talking over the noise of big bands for years. At the end of the evening, the crowd (which had never been hostile even when he was futilely blowing air through his mouthpiece) was shouting “Play ‘The Body’!’ Play ‘The Body’!” (meaning “Body and Soul,” the classic Hawkins recording of 1939). Finally Hawkins, who was leaving town after the set, shouted, “I’ll play it tomorrow night!”

I also remember, at this same Louisville date, a scene somewhat similar to the one with the old man and Monk: someone brought up to Hawkins their broken 78 l.p. recording of “Body and Soul,” and he and Hawkins just kept staring at it, shaking their heads.

DUKE ELLINGTON (1899-1974)

In 1966, over my college’s Thanksgiving vacation, I went to New York to hear Duke Ellington and a small band at the old Rainbow Grill (no longer in existence) on the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. I must have looked like an absolute rube, but the waiter gave me a table very close to the band, sitting by myself, and let me remain for the second set at no charge. I was in heaven. Since I had obviously come for the music, I suppose he took pity on me. Memories: after lots of rare tunes, a request from someone in the audience to play the Ellington standard “Mood Indigo,” and the trio that begins the song, walking up to the microphone audibly swearing and grumbling about having to play the damn thing again when the evening was going so well . . . Ellington sitting next to my table at intermission, all charm . . . Harry Carney (1910-74), the baritone saxophone player, winking at me as the band finally left – he too had spotted a fan.

I saw Ellington twice more at the Rainbow Grill, but the music was never quite as good, partly because he was playing less new and more party stuff – he always had that urge to as it were dance on the table to entertain the crowd. Better was a full-band appearance in downtown Baltimore at a city festival, when Ellington, realizing that crowd dynamics could be precarious in that situation, played piano through the intermission, getting one musician or another to play with him until the whole band came back. Even better still was an early afternoon appearance for the Newport Jazz Festival in Carnegie Hall. When we walked in, the band was still rehearsing; Ellington, in informal clothes, was working some things out, and he didn’t stop, even with the audience filtering in, until he was satisfied. Then he went offstage, changed, and came out again in his tux to start the formal part of the presentation. I got to hear Duke Ellington rehearse!

MISCELLANY

I heard the composer and pianist Eubie Blake (1887-1983) play outdoors in Exxon Park, near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, playing in the rain, and irritated when he missed notes because he was afraid people would think he was making mistakes because he was old (he was almost one hundred) and not because the keys were slippery. He had huge hands, huge fingers.

I heard the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on the Staten Island Ferry (and could be dimly seen in a picture on the front page of the New York Times the next day) and mostly remember their antipathy toward the much requested “When The Saints Go Marching In,” which they must have heard in their sleep.

I saw the bandleader and pianist Count Basie (1904-84) only once, at a festival at night in Baltimore, where the Count played one short blues chorus that I swear was the best jazz solo I’ve ever heard; I wish I could remember it. At the same show Monk was introduced as follows: “Some of you will like this man’s music, some of you will hate it” – a Neanderthal announcer. This same festival featured Woody Herman (1913-87), Miles Davis (1926-91) (I remember his playing with his back turned to the audience), and Dizzy Gillespie (1917-93), who basically played his night club act.

I saw Diz a couple of other times, once with a large Latin band, and he always held his own. Rather unbelievably, over the years I also got to see Charles Mingus (1922-79), Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), B. B. King (1925-2015), Benny Goodman (1909-86), Jimmy Smith (1925/28–2005), Billy Eckstine (1914-93), Sarah Vaughn (1924-90), Buddy Rich (1917-87), Max Roach (1924-2007), Dave Brubeck (1920-2012), Teddy Wilson (1912-86) . . . . Of the people I could have seen and didn’t, the one I most regret missing is Louis Armstrong (1901-71). He, and almost everyone else mentioned in this piece, is no longer with us. Heaven must be a swell place to live.

[“If there’s a rock and roll heaven / Well you know they’ve got a hell of a band, band, band”!  And if there’s a jazz heaven . . . well, that joint be rockin’!

[My dad was a jazz aficionado (so was my Uncle Herb, but I didn’t live with him!), so I grew up listening to most of these guys (and the gals, too).  But I never caught the bug—not like Kirk by any stretch.  I heard the Preservation Hall Band—in Preservation Hall in New Orleans back in the mid-70s; I even interviewed Max Roach some years before he died.  But my most memorable jazz experience—possibly not counting just hanging around NOLA’s Vieux Carré, where jazz comes out of every door as soon as the sun goes down—was a concert by one of my dad’s all-time favorite artists: Ella Fitzgerald.  I can’t remember the exact circumstances of the evening—I recall it was a school group, not something I did with my dad, and it must have been in Geneva when I was a high school senior in Switzerland in 1964-65.  I also no longer remember the program, though I know Ella sang all her standards.  I also know she brought down the house, including us callow teens (not to mention the Calvinist Swiss)—that woman knew how to ramp up an audience!  The one song I distinctly remember her singing—and I can still visualize her doing the number—was her unique riff on “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.”  It was her finale, and we demanded an encore as well.  No jazz fan, I—but I’ll never forget that gig!]

The (Drag) King of Jazz

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Broadway play M. Butterfly, the story of a French embassy official in Beijing who has a decades-long affair with a Chinese actress and singer.  As anyone who’s seen the play or the 1993 film adaptation will know, the Beijing Opera performer was in reality a Chinese spy . . . and a man.

Hwang’s play is fictional, but it was based on a real incident and real people, including Shi Pei Pu, the singer who passed for a woman and even produced a son she told her French lover was the result of their liaison.  Beijing Opera is an all-male form of theater—the female characters, known as a dan, are all played by male actors who specialize in them.  (The famous Mei Lanfang was a dan actor and so was Bruce Lee’s father, Lee Hoi-Chuen.)  Similarly, Japanese Kabuki, a related performance form, is also the domain of male performers and there are onnagata, specialists in female roles, who have lived their off-stage lives as women.  But dan like Shi Pei Pu (who died in 2009) and the onnagata are actors, and they’re specially trained and practiced in the art of appearing and behaving as their opposite gender.  (The Japanese contend that only a man can portray the ultra-feminine characters demanded by Kabuki, that no born female could be so dedicated and compelling.)  These actors have made gender-shifting their life’s occupation and study, even when they take it outside the theater.  What, then, do we make of Dorothy Lucille Tipton, a jazz musician and bandleader who lived in Spokane, Washington?  Dorothy Tipton was better known as William Lee Tipton, or simply, Billy—and she lived most of her life as a man. 

Gender, as the postmodern saying goes, is performance—an expression of the belief that “sex” is an anatomical and biological construct, determined by nature, while “gender” is cultural and social.  We may have been born with determined sex differences (female; male), but gender differences (femininity; masculinity) are behavioral—that is, performed—and may be chosen, changed, and blurred pretty much at will or inclination.

Dorothy Tipton was born in Oklahoma City on 29 December 1914 (in Billy’s later account, he shaved six years off his age); her father, G. W. (for George William) Tipton, a machinist, built, repaired, and raced automobiles and airplanes.  In the 1920s, G. W. Tipton, known as Billy, began designing planes and flying air mail in and out of Oklahoma City.  Both Tipton’s parents, G.W. and the former Reggie Parks, played popular music on the piano and Tipton learned to play the violin and started giving concerts at 7; she later studied music in Kansas City.  After her parents divorced in 1928, Tipton was taken to KC to live with her father’s wealthy sister, Bess, who introduced her to the piano.  It was here, in one of the nation’s great jazz towns and during the nascence of the Big Band era, that Tipton, who took the nickname “Tippy” around then, began to become seriously interested in jazz and studied piano and saxophone, which remained Billy Tipton’s principal instruments.  When she reached high school, Tipton wanted to join the school band, but was barred because she was a girl.  Returning to Oklahoma City and her mother, Tippy Tipton finished high school in 1932 and went on to Connors State Agricultural College, a junior college in Warner, Oklahoma, where she was finally able to join the school’s band. 

It was also at this time, about 1934 when Tipton turned 20, that she began appearing in male garb, in hope, she later asserted, that this would enhance her chances of being taken seriously in the largely all-male world of jazz bands.  At several auditions, the club managers would say that though Tipton was very talented, they wouldn’t hire a woman musician.  To pass as a man, Tipton cut her hair, padded her pants, and bound her breasts, a practice she’d later explain as support for the ribs fractured when a Buick crashed into her.  She even obtained documents identifying her as a male, and at her next audition, Tipton got the gig.  At first, Tipton dressed in male drag mostly for performances, but by 1940, the musician was living as a man off stage as well.  She also adopted her father’s nickname, “Billy,” at the same time.  Now permanently taking on the role of a male piano- and sax-player billed as Billy Lee Tipton, the jazz instrumentalist undertook the further daring step of dating a girl, Non Earl Harrell, a “horse,” or professional on the faddish walkathon circuit, who was soon known as “Mrs. Tipton”—a title eventually held by at least five women over Tipton’s lifetime.  (None of his “marriages” was strictly legal: none of them, nor his “divorces,” was recorded.) 

By 1936, Billy Tipton was leading his own band and appearing regularly on radio stations in OKC.  His talent was attracting considerable acclaim and by 1940 he’d joined Scott Cameron’s big band playing all around the Midwest and into Wyoming and Colorado. The next year, Tipton  and Non Earl moved to Joplin, Missouri, a music town, and played for 2½ years at the Cotton Club and around the Midwest, followed by two years or so gigging in Texas.  Tipton was sharpening his chops and gaining a rep as a talented pianist and sax-player—and nobody questioned his gender, despite his diminutive size (5’4”), wide hips, pink cheeks, baby face, and high-pitched tenor.  In 1942, he broke up with Non Earl and had a liaison with an amateur singer named June.  By 1946, he was “married” to pretty, 19-year-old Betty, a farm girl with a spectacular figure with whom he stayed for seven years.

In 1949, Tipton was asked to rejoin George Mayer’s Sophisticated Swing Trio, which planned to get in on the Pacific Northwest club circuit action.  For a brief time in the 1950s, recorded Diane Wood Middlebrook, Tipton’s biographer (Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, 1999), gambling in private clubs in Washington State was legal, drawing gaming tourists to the state from all over the country.  Though the first dates weren’t very auspicious, they did have a benefit.  One local radio station in Roseburg, Oregon, recorded the Thursday-night gigs at the club the Sophisticated Swing Trio was playing, and so four of their performances survive for posterity.  During the three years that followed, Mayer’s trio played the northwest circuit in Oregon and Washington, and as far east as Idaho and Montana.  Soon, Dave Sobol Entertianment Agency of Spokane began booking the trio’s gigs, putting the ensemble into some of the best clubs in the region, including the Boulevard Club in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where Tipton and his fellow musicians shared the stage with the likes of the Ink Spots, the Delta Rhythm Boys, and Billy Eckstine. 

In 1951, in Longview, Washington, Tipton began to form his own group, the Billy Tipton Trio, which eventually included Ron Kilde on bass and Dick O’Neil on drums.  Tipton started a professional association with Sobol who booked the trio into top-flight hotels in Spokane like the Ridpath and the Davenport where the combo played Dixieland and covers of poplar jazz classics.  They were also not above a little slapstick and costumed gags: one report had it that Tipton slapped on a bonnet as the trio swung into Ella Fitzgerald’s famous 1938 rendition of “A-Tisket A-Tasket.”  He was an accomplished emcee and showman for the little floor shows his band had to put on to please their customers, and he became popular for his convivial persona, spiffy attire, and boyish good looks.  A natural mimic—as a musician and bandleader, Tipton was expected to sound as much like the artists he and his combo covered as possible—he created small vaudeville skits in which he enacted rubes, dunces, clowns, and kids; he played everything, in fact, except grown women and wrote punny blackouts and one-liners to keep the audience amused.  In 1954, Tipton met his fourth wife, Maryann, a sometime call girl.

The trio still toured, however, and while gigging in Santa Barbara, California, in 1956, the combo was heard by a scout for Tops Records out of L.A.  The label signed them to a contract and in 1957 issued two albums, Sweet Georgia Brown and Billy Tipton Plays Hi-Fi on Piano, which contained such jazz standards as “What’ll I Do,” “The Man I Love,” “Willow Weep For Me,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and “Don’t Blame Me.”  The recordings sold respectably and brought the Billy Tipton Trio some renown and better offers, including the house-band spot at the new Holiday Hotel casino in Reno, Nevada, in 1958.  Tipton disappointed his two bandmates, however, not only by turning down the lucrative chance at the big time, but also by declining four additional albums for Tops.  Apparently he feared the spotlight would be too bright for his other performance.

Tipton moved to his last hometown, Spokane, in 1958 and the trio played weekly gigs in local clubs for the next decade, during which Tipton also acted as a booker for Sobol’s agency, helping younger musicians find work in the business.  He ended up owning the agency, but retired from performing in 1973 when arthritis in his fingers and bursitis made playing painful.  He also suffered from emphysema and ulcers, but declined to see a doctor.

In 1962, Tipton left Maryann and “married” his fifth “wife,” a busty, red-headed former stripper named Kitty, and they raised a family including three adopted sons, John (b. 1963), Scott (b. 1963), and William (b. 1969).  (He explained that the need to adopt was the result of his “sterility” from that encounter with the Buick which left him with severe damage to his ribcage and genitals.)  The couple became active in the PTA, the Boy Scouts, and their community; Tipton was always the first to arrange a benefit for a cause or a friend in need.  Tipton devoted himself to his boys: “He was always there for me,” said son John, and Scott declared, “He did a helluva good job with us.  That's what mattered.”  Though the musician was no athlete, he played ball with his sons and took them camping—but he never went swimming and he always wore a T-shirt and an athletic cup outside his underwear.  Tipton seldom spoke of his private life or any of his personal problems, and he rarely saw a doctor and, though he had a Social Security number, he claimed no benefits in his later life.  He and Kitty had separate bedrooms (“Kitty liked to stay up late,” explained John) and, according to one report, the musician only made love in a darkened room and usually only half-undressed; he “was deft at the use of a prosthetic device.”

After a quarrel, Tipton separated from Kitty in 1982.  He and his sons moved into a run-down mobile home in a trailer park on the outskirts of Spokane.  The boys left, his income dwindled, and he spent his last years broke.  Refusing to see a doctor despite failing health, he collapsed and died of a perforated ulcer on 21 January 1989.  He’d made a comfortable living for himself and his family as a musician—he called himself an “entertainer”—but his final estate was almost all debts.

At his death, when the coroner revealed Tipton’s anomalous sexuality, his ex-wives and sons all insisted that they had had no idea their husband and father had been born a woman and had disguised himself as a man—without surgical enhancement or hormones—for 55 years.  (His aunts and cousins back in Oklahoma and Missouri, with whom he remained in contact, still knew him as Dorothy, but since he never let his former existence as a female and his present one as a male bleed into one another, neither camp knew of the other life.)  He portrayed an exemplary citizen, a dedicated family man, an affectionate husband, and a loving father.  If anyone had known, or even suspected, no one said anything in all those years.  Dave Sobol, Tipton’s longtime friend and agent, remembered him as “a perfect gentleman.”  The musician and bandleader may have begun impersonating a man for financial reasons, a ploy against the sexism of the industry, or even as a sort of joke—propositions most people who had something to say about Tipton’s deception after his death reject—but it became his life. 

There remains considerable mystery about how the former Dorothy Tipton maintained the fiction, and no one’s talking, leaving it all up to conjecture and prurient imagining.  (Kitty, who died in 2007, ordered Tipton’s body cremated, so the physical evidence is gone.)  There remains a lot of speculation about Tipton’s motivation for his gender-bending life and the nature of his true sexual orientation.  (The notion of transgenderism hadn’t been conceived in Tipton’s day; the term itself didn’t even appear until 1965 and at his death, the concept had barely been defined, much less come into common use.)  “He got tired of keeping that secret,” lamented John. “That’s what probably gave him the ulcers and killed him.”  His brother Scott added, “I think he probably never told us because he was afraid we might have rejected him.  I could have accepted it. . . .  He was my dad.”  Youngest son William, however, acknowledges, “Now I feel that though I knew him for 18 years, I never knew him at all.”  (Years later, William—who sometimes called himself Billy Tipton, Jr.—said, “He was a phenomenal person.  He was a better man than most men could be.”)  Curiously, though, he may have hinted at his double life through inside jokes that seemed insignificant . . . until you knew the truth.  One of the sketches he wrote for his trio’s performances went like this: “How many sexes are there?” asked the straight man.  Responded Tipton: “The male sex, the female sex, and the insects.”

Ironically, due to a split in the family after Tipton’s death, the musician’s ashes were divided between two family camps, one box going to John and Scott and the other to William.  Diane Middlebrook reported that a local journalist reflected, “Even now, ironically, there are two Billy Tiptons.”  Middlebrook observed that at Tipton’s death, no trace of the breast bindings and the jockstrap, what the biographer called his “sex-concealing gear,” was found in the trailer.  “Billy,” Middlebrook speculated, “had prepared to emerge from behind his screen like the Wizard of Oz.”

(The bandleader’s biographer also found double meaning in some of the songs the Billy Tipton Trio played, such as “Exactly Like You”; “All of Me”; “The Way You Look Tonight”; and “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” with lyrics that plead, “It wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.”  But, of course, these were also just the jazz standards the trio’s audiences expected to hear.)

Many years after Tipton’s death, Brook Ellingwood, a staff writer at KCTS-TV, the PBS outlet in Seattle/Yakima, Washington, described the musician’s life as “a set of Russian nesting dolls,” with “a talented girl wanting to play” jazz inside “a cross-dressing woman” inside “a pleasant yet unremarkable heterosexual man.”  I don’t see Tipton as a set of dolls, though.  That’s way too passive and rigid for what he did.  In my perception, the life of Billy Tipton was a concurrent array of performances, like Charles Spencer Chaplin playing Charlie Chaplin playing The Little Tramp playing The Lone Prospector (his character in The Gold Rush) playing various roles (explorer, waiter, valet, millionaire, dancer, lover, and so on).  Dorothy/Billy Tipton was, simultaneously or serially, a young, jazz obsessed girl; a talented musician and bandleader; a female musician dressed as a male for professional reasons; a woman living as a man; a husband and lover; a father; a community-oriented gentleman.  To borrow (and slightly misapply) words from William Shakespeare: “All the world's a stage, / . . . / And one man in his time plays many parts.”  Whenever Billy Tipton ventured forth, at home or in public, he wore several (if not all) of these costumes.

Of Dorothy’s relationship to Billy, Middlebrook put it aptly:  “[H]er sexual identity became an exquisite act . . . .  [S]he was the actor; he was the role.”  All we can say for sure is that Dorothy Lucille Tipton took on the part of Billy Lee Tipton in 1934 and made it the longest-running—and arguably the most successful—performance of all time.  After all, even The Fantasticks only ran 42 years—13 years fewer than Billy!  (Okay, London’s The Mousetrap has run 62 years to date—but both Fantasticks and Mousetrap changed casts—Billy Tipton never did.  So there!)

[Like many actors and screen personalities during their lifetimes, Tipton became a symbol after his death and his photo was used as an iconic image.  He appeared on the cover of Lou Sullivan’s Information for the Female to Male Cross-Dresser and Transsexual (Ingersoll Gender Center, 1990).  There have also been many adaptations of the Billy Tipton story—I wonder how Tipton himself would feel about that, having worked so hard to keep his private life to himself for so long.  Aside from the biography by Diane Middlebrook (who died in 2007) and countless articles (including nationwide obituaries) both in print and on line, there are:

• Stevie Wants to Play the Blues by Eduardo Machado, a 1990 play based on Tipton’s life, performed at the Los Angeles Theatre Center
• “Tipton” by folksinger Phranc, a 1991 song in tribute to the musician
• The Opposite Sex Is Neither, a theatrical revue by Kate Bornstein, featuring Tipton, premièred at the Fourth Annual National Festival of Lesbian and Gay Performance (Highways, Santa Monica, California), 1992
• Billy by Timothy Brock (music) and Bryan Willis (libretto), an opera based on Tipton’s life, staged in Olympia, Washington, in 1994
• Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man by Alix Umen and Prisco, a 1995 eight-minute film based on Tipton’s life and career
• The Slow Drag by Carson Kreitzer, a 1996 jazz musical based on Tipton’s life, performed at the American Place Theatre, New York City, and the Whitehall Theatre, London
• Trumpet by Jackie Kay, a 1998 novel based on Tipton’s life
• “The Legend of Billy Tipton” by the punk band The Video Dead, a song about Tipton’s story on the 2003 album Shogun Sessions
• “Kill Me, Por Favor” by Ry Cooder, a 2011 short story including a section about Tipton in the collection Los Angeles Stories
• A Girl Named Bill – The Life and Times of Billy Tipton by Nellie McKay, a 2014 cabaret act drawing on the story of Billy Tipton]